JFK: Most Americans still suspicious
Forty years after President John F Kennedy’s assassination, an overwhelming majority of Americans do not believe the official conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, killed the president with a cheap mail-order rifle fired from the Texas School Book Depository.
Thousands of books, movies and internet chatrooms have fuelled dozens of conspiracy theories that it was a plot by the Mafia, the Cubans, the KGB, the CIA, even Vice President Lyndon Johnson, and that other shots came from the grassy knoll or other spots around Dealey Plaza.
Despite four decades of technical improvements in forensics and film enhancement, the questions at the heart of the theories have changed little since November 22, 1963: Who killed Kennedy as he rode in an open Lincoln convertible through downtown Dallas? How many shots were fired? Did Oswald have help?
Oswald, arrested shortly after the assassination, was silenced two days later when nightclub owner Jack Ruby gunned him down as police transferred him from a jail. Answering the question of who was behind the shooting was left to the government-appointed Warren Commission, which after a 10-month investigation concluded in 1964 that Oswald acted alone, firing from the book depository’s sixth floor.
Yet today, only 32% of American adults accept that Oswald was the only gunman, according to an ABC News poll conducted earlier this month. Fifty-one per cent believe there was a second gunman.
In other questions, 70% said they thought the assassination was part of a broader plot, and more than two-thirds believed there was a government cover-up.
In 1966, three years after Kennedy’s death, 46% of people surveyed in a Harris poll believed the assassination was part of a broader plot. By 1983, that number had reached 80% in an ABC poll.
Some experts have suggested that the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon deepened Americans’ cynicism and eroded trust in government.
“Many people look at the Kennedy assassination as a turning point, when people started realising and thinking and believing their government would lie to them and lie to them repeatedly,” said Gary Mack, curator of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas.
Perhaps the most persistently questioned finding of the Warren Commission is the “magic bullet” theory.
The theory assumes that Oswald alone fired three shots and that one bullet zigzagged through both Kennedy and Texas governor John Connally. The bullet is said to have gone through Kennedy’s throat, then into Connally, puncturing his lung, hitting his rib and wrist and then exiting relatively unscathed.
James Fetzer, author of Assassination Science: Experts Speak Out on the Death of JFK, says the Kennedy X-rays and the film of the assassination by bystander Abraham Zapruder were fabricated and that there were actually six or so people firing at the president that day.
“The driver actually brought the limo to a halt to make sure Kennedy was hit enough times to be killed. The Secret Service set him up, and we have more than 15 indications of them doing that,” Fetzer said.
“The order of vehicles in the motorcade were wrong, that’s perhaps the most telling. Nixon knew about it, too. [FBI director] J Edgar Hoover and LBJ were involved as well, I’m sorry to say.”
In 1967, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison claimed the assassination was a CIA-led coup. Garrison’s theories went to court – and eventually made their way into Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie, JFK – but Clay Shaw, the alleged “evil genius” behind the assassination, was acquitted in less than an hour.
Conspiracy theorists now use the internet to bounce their ideas around the globe, build databases and convert a new generation of believers.
ABC and Court TV both ran sophisticated computer simulations this month of the crime scene and an analysis of a police audiotape, asserting that the Warren Commission got it right – Oswald alone killed Kennedy.
